7. O Lucky Man! (1973)
I'm a big fan of Lindsay Anderson. He's one of the best directors that Britain has ever produced, and I've covered all three instalments of his Mick Travis trilogy on
The Movie Hour podcast some years ago. But as much as I will defend
O Lucky Man! (the middle instalment) as a unique cinematic experience, even I would struggle to justify its length. The other films I've covered on this list thus far have all been a case of not having enough plot to justify their length. With
O Lucky Man!, there may be too much plot in the first place. The film is based loosely on Voltaire's epic novel
Candide, and finds our protagonist Mick Travis trying to make his way in modern Britain, starting out as a coffee salesman but soon getting embroiled in bizarre experiments, illegal bullion smuggling and making out with a young Helen Mirren. There's a lot of interesting ideas in
O Lucky Man!: it's a satirical look at commercialism, a comment on the role of luck in a meritocracy, and a tongue-in-cheek tribute to 18th-century adventure stories like
Gulliver's Travels. But all the ideas aren't developed as much as we would like, since the story takes a dramatic turn as soon we start getting comfortable. Cutting the film even by half an hour would also have sorted out a lot of its tonal issues, bringing it somewhere into the territory of
If... or
Britannia Hospital (the other instalments of the trilogy).